While the search tool and archive system provided by WordPress on the right side of my blog, just below my picture, works pretty well, I occasionally find myself frustrated when I am trying to find a post on a specific topic. A number of times, I have tried to develop my own indexing system, and I notice in my statistics that folks occasionally seek out the posts with the index. Sadly, I have not been very consistent in getting a full index in place and then keeping it current.

But, there is some good news if you were one of the people looking for an index. I just stumbled into a way to create one very quickly from the blog statistics page that I have access to as the administrator of my blog. And, but taking the list and inserting it into Excel, I find that I can sort it alphabetically by title and still preserve the hyperlinks.

So, here is a complete list of all of my posts, sorted by topic and with hyperlinks. I think you can use the search feature of a browser to find a topic you might be interested. For instance, if you are in this post and using Internet Explorer and press “Control” and “F” at the same time, you will open up a little search bar. You can see it in this screen shot right above the WordPress header.

When you type your search terms in there, the tool automatically moves you to the first occurrence and then highlights the rest. In the screen shot, I had entered the words “System Diagram” into the search bar and, as you can see, it has taken me to the posts with those words in the title.

Moving forward, I will try to leverage that feature to make things easier to search for. And I will try to update the index on a regular basis now that I have figured out how to do it. I will start those posts with the words “Index Update” to make them easy to find in the search tool.

I should also mention that many of the posts on this list are from when my blog was on the Consulting Specifying Engineers website. When that magazine shut down, I moved the content from their site to the current location to keep the blog going. But the bad news there was that the formatting did not hold up and a lot of the images were lost.

So, I have been going back and restoring the old posts as time permits, mostly if I see a number of people trying to access them. But, if you open a post and find it to be hard to read and missing the graphics and you really wanted the information, send me a comment and I will try to restore it sooner rather than later.

The current version of the index starts below my signature. Hope you find it helpful.

3 Responses to Index Update: A Current Index to All of my Posts

David,
Sorry for contacting you this way but your email link for FDE is not working. I was interested in attending your Nov. 2012 Sequence of Operations webinar but I had a schedule conflict. BCA indicated that they were recording the webinar and would make it available for on demand viewing in Jan. 2013. I email them recently and they indicated that they had technical difficulties with the recording and it may not be published. Do you know when you will be presenting this program again?

Thanks for the “heads up” on the e-mail link. I will need to check into that.

With regard to the BCA Seminar, I don’t think there are any definate plans to present it again at this point in time. But, if I understand the agreement I signed correctly when I developed it (and I may not being that I am not a lawyer) I think it is O.K. for me to share a .pdf copy of the slides with people. So, I will put a copy on my Google Drive in a minute. Once it is there, you should be able to find it by using the link lists on the right side of the blog home page. It will be under “03 – Materials from Classes and Presentations” in the folder you will link to by selecting the “Building Commissioning Association” link. The file will be called “Commissioning Control Sequences.pdf”.

Having said that, I will have to make sure that “officially” I can do it, which means I need to call Liz or Sheri at BCA on Monday and beg forgiveness. If they say I can’t do this, then I will have to pull it back off my Google Drive and will see if there is some other way to get the information to you. But I think everything should be O.K.